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      August 29, 2019Naming the BeastsElizabeth Morton

      Image: “Restricted | U.S. Air Force” by B.A. Van Sise from his “Elsewhere” series. “Naming the Beasts” was written by Elizabeth Morton for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, July 2019, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.
      The planes went down the same day Romulus and Remus
      were butchered.
      And I walked barefoot through the cattlegrass,
      mooed to Romulus and Remus
      and they said how do you do?
      as though it were an ordinary Tuesday.
      As though the stock truck
      parked outside the old schoolhouse
      were just a metaphor for everything
      thrust into double digits. The sky was cheesecake.
      Sweetgums were bald to skin and bone. Wind licked
      the bluegrass, retelling comedies
      only the weather sees. What world is this?
      Romulus and Remus were the hot breath
      rising from the schoolhouse kettle,
      the two sparrows that knocked against the car windshield
      on that lonely highway. They were a pair of headlights.
      They were possums spent on nightfall, giddy
      with the casual light of passing tankers.
      Romulus and Remus loped onto the truck ramp,
      Said how do you do? And I. And I. And I.
      I walked barefoot through embers only to turn back halfway,
      to shrug at the ordinary Tuesday, to let what happens
      happen. I hid from the bellowing, under husk and chaff,
      in the noise of harrower and winnower.
      Later, I sat in the diner, watched two planes go down on a city,
      into the stubble of people and places
      just doing what people and places do.
      As though little men falling from windows
      were just a metaphor for everything haunted
      by what we never fix.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the editor, Timothy Green

      “That Tuesday being such a gorgeous late-summer day in New York, I was surprised at how many of the poets thought of September 11th when looking at this photograph. I assumed I wouldn’t select one of them—it just doesn’t fit. But then I fell in love with the turns and turns of phrase in this poem, and those two cows loping toward their fate, and I realized that it would have been late-winter in the southern hemisphere, the first buds of spring not quite appearing on the trees. That thought opened something up for me—something about the combination of vastness and interconnectedness of the world—and I’ll never think of 9/11 in quite the same way again. Eighteen years later now, I wouldn’t have thought that possible.”

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